Website Performance testing isn’t that simple like the functional or any other black box testing technique because of its complicated real like setup required for testing.

It requires special attention and there are several factors to be kept in mind before performing this test.

In this tutorial, I have covered details on what really is Website performance testing, what steps should we take to performance test a website, what are the tools that can be used for testing and some of its service providers in the current market.

What is Website Performance Testing?

A performance test is a non-functional testing done to test the responsiveness, throughput, and the scalability of a website under test. This mainly benefits in improving the user experience and increase in revenue generation.

There are various types of the performance test that can be done like the ones given below:

Performance Test – This testing includes checking the responsiveness, speed, and scalability of the website.

Load Test – This is done to verify the website behavior under a certain workload.

Stress Test – This helps a tester find out how the system reacts under extreme load conditions. This helps in finding issues related to memory leaks, synchronization etc.

Capacity Test – This test is done to ensure how many users/transaction can be supported at a time.

Endurance Test – This is done to ensure if the system will be able to handle the expected load for a long period of time.

How Should You do Website Performance Testing?

Before you start performance testing a website, there are few considerations that are to be kept in the mind.

They are:

Understand the purpose of the Website, try to find out if it involves payment gateways, web services etc.

Understand the reason for performance testing and find out what actually needs to be measured like the number of users, volume, response time etc.

Understand the customer’s expectation.

Understand the Project schedule and the QA window.

Understand the availability of resources and the QA tools.

You can also create a checklist to note down the Performance Analysis/Acceptance criteria’s like:

What’s the acceptable time between transactions/user clicks?

What’s the expected average session duration of a user?

What’s the acceptable page load time?

Are there current baselines available to measure against?

What analytics tools are used to identify high volumes?

Steps to Performance Test a Website

Given below is a pictorial representation of the steps involved while performance testing a website:

Conclusion

If you have been in the performance testing sector, you will clearly understand how vast the topic is.

It is not possible to cover all the topics in this tutorial. However, I have tried to cover just the important aspects of Website Performance testing to give you a very basic idea of what it is. Hope, this tutorial would have given you pointers on why performance testing is considered to be so important and what all points should be kept in mind before performing the test.